Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

Jochen Gerz (born in 1940 in Berlin) became well known to a broader German public in the 1980s creating monuments to the Holocaust.

The art historian Uwe Schneede honoured him in his History of 20th Century Art as the artist who "with his sense of the value of memory and his political consciousness... has given public monuments and memorials a new meaning." For the younger generation of artists, by contrast, Gerz is one of the few models available to them as a media artist. At first sight, the development of his work from artistic monuments to the new media does seem to lack continuity, but in fact all his works are based on a fundamental concept of democracy: democracy will never be built lounging on a sofa, it needs to be lived, and all of us are called upon to have an active part in it. This democratic thinking is the continuum in the art of Jochen Gerz.

This autumn, three projects by Jochen Gerz can be seen simultaneously in Passau, a city in Bavaria that has been more notable for conservative traditions than critical contemporary art till now. And yet an exciting media project involving the "Passauer Neue Presse" newspaper, its readers, the media philosopher Friedrich Kittler and Jochen Gerz took place there. The philosopher put six questions formulated by the artist to the readers, for example "How long would you like to live?" and "Will the Nazis come back again?" A whole page of the newspaper was reserved for each question, with the philosopher's commentary printed next to a space for readers to write in their own opinions. About 900 readers were moved to send in their answers to the newspaper: a great success. The response is documented at the Media Centre of the Verlagsgruppe Passau publishing group until 23 November.

The results would not have been very different if the project had been conducted in Berlin or another city. For Gerz, who has lived in Paris since 1966, the cultural divide between the big city and the provinces is not really so great because "the public sphere in the big city and the public sphere in the countryside may differ from each other, but not as far as the understanding of art is concerned. The media have an impact on the big city and on the countryside. That levels the differences."

Authors not consumers

The levelling, filtering media have a key role in contemporary democracy. In Jochen Gerz's eyes, they function just as traditionally as culture itself. "A great intellect is supposed to create things for others. No democracy can function on that basis. So far we have not yet made it a reality." The Passau newspaper project is based on the artistic conviction that "consumers in our media-saturated democracy are chronically underchallenged, that they do not in any way at all contribute what they could contribute. This is characteristic of our culture, which produces too many viewers, characteristic of our society, of our democracy, which produces too many passive consumers."

Jochen Gerz would like to make his viewers more than just viewers, which is why he calls his works "authorial projects": "Every human being has great potential for what we call creativity. We would live in a richer and more artistic society if we had a republic of authors."

Art as a game

At the Passau Art Club, the artist acts as a player who provides the impetus to bring together the participants in a project or game, who gets things moving and then lets them take their random course without manipulation. For "Miami Islet", the visitor is able to bring an empty bottle with them and throw it against a wall. The pile of broken glass that is slowly taking shape as people do this is intended to recall the dead American artist Robert Smithson, who wanted to cover a rocky island rising from the sea near Vancouver with broken glass in spring 1970 and became the target of attacks by the environmental organisation Greenpeace. For the project "Your Chair", which Gerz conceived in 2001, art lovers can borrow a folding stool from the Art Club, sit on it in a pedestrian precinct and ask passers-by for money. They are rewarded for their begging activities with an original Gerz certificate.

The art of memory

At the same time, Gerz is holding a comprehensive retrospective of his work over 30 years at the Passau Museum of Modern Art. This includes materials documenting his "Monument against Fascism" in Hamburg-Harburg (1986-1993), for which he and his wife Esther Shalev-Gerz designed a 12-meter high stela with a lead coating that citizens were able to carve their names into. The stela was gradually lowered into the ground. This project undermines our belief that we continue to need visible memorials to keep the memory of the Holocaust, the persecution and annihilation of millions of people, alive for us. For "nothing can rise up against injustice in our place. It is not possible to do anything that people do not do themselves."

Gerz himself has come to view the Holocaust as "the most important experience of my life, not as a presence, but as an absence". However, his confidence in a collective democratic feat of memory remains unbroken. This also permits forgetting, for "every memory is born anew from forgetting. Every moment is born anew from forgetting." But is there not, particularly at the moment, a tendency for people in Germany to wash their hands of the past, now that the generation of perpetrators and victims is no longer with us? "I have always argued for a restitution of the concept of the perpetrator. Any form of past is a form of help and orientation. I have no idea where they are running to when they run away from their past."